How we got here

It all started in early August, just after my birthday. I noticed that the hubby wasn’t really doing great. He seemed angry all the time, and he just didn’t seem to have any energy. We were fighting about stupid shit constantly, and I was really starting to wonder if we were going to need a come-to-Jesus meeting of some sort. He’d been to see his doctor sometime that month because he was having strange pains in his side. She gave him some antibiotics, told him it might be appendicitis and that if the pain got worse or included nausea, he should go to the ER immediately. He took the antibiotics and the pain went away, he said. By Labor Day weekend he was a raging asshole and I wasn’t sure I could deal with him anymore (and I was out of town). When I got home he was in so much pain that he couldn’t sleep. We went to the emergency room on Tuesday morning. I dropped him off, and they told me I couldn’t sit in the waiting room with him.

These motherfuckers put a security guard between me and my husband and they left him in the waiting room for 7.5 hours. If not for text messaging, I wouldn’t have known what was going on. I called everyone at the hospital I could find, screaming, yelling, and threatening to sue. I called his doctor and begged her to intercede (she declined. Bitch.). By the time they finally saw him, the pain was so bad that they put him on morphine.

After that things got worse.

After 8 days of hell, full of dipshit doctors, nonanswers, a steadfast refusal to give him his blood pressure medication, STILL MORE YELLING, an appendectomy, and a few nasty days trying to fight off an infection, and they sent him home. (Great nurses though.)

Two weeks later they got the results of the biopsy of his appendix, and they told us he had Burkitt’s lymphoma, a form of cancer rarely seen in the Western world.

Now he has tubes sticking out of his chest. It’s hard for me to wrap my arms around him in the surprise hugs that have been the hallmark of our relationship. He’s shaved his arms because he’s tired of losing hair from all the IVs. He’s covered in stubble, makes it hard to curl up to him (his whole body is fairly stabby). He’s more irritable than ever. He starts chemo next week. Our lives are upside-down.

Fucking cancer.